LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO: Closing Time

Growing up around Houston, I’ve often remarked that as much as the city changes, it often stays the same. It’s akin to a city that’s been frozen in time, yet also slowly thawing. Shops may come and go, but the heart of the neighborhoods is always the same. There’s also the fact that due to its sprawling metropolitan layout, it’s a city of “pockets” of culture rather than a cohesive vibe of a city in the way Austin tends to have. 1983’s Last Night at the Alamo, from Texas indie auteur Eagle Pennell, is a perfect snapshot of this, capturing a night of debauchery and melancholia in a small Houston bar. 

Set entirely over the course of one night, the film is set at the titular Alamo, a small bar that is to be closed the next day forever. The local barflies all congregate around, lamenting the fall of their favorite watering hole and looking for any way out of their own problems that are waiting for them the next morning. All of them are led by “Cowboy” (Sonny Carl Davis), the ten gallon hat wearing patriarch of this motley crew of degenerates.

At a brief 81 minutes, Kim Henkel’s (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame!) script isn’t interested in an elaborate plot or in-depth character study, but rather in delivering an unfettered slice of Texan life, warts and all. To that end, the characters are often sexist, obnoxious, or downright violent, but there’s a charm to the honesty of it. Dialogue is heavily peppered with every swear you can think of it, to the point that it all seems improvised by actors who don’t know what to say or what the script even was, but it all holds together thanks to Pennell’s non-interventionist approach behind the camera. He doesn’t try to track around the characters or even use a shot-reverse shot for conversation. Characters speaking to each other are usually in the same frame, crafting a sense of unease as there is nothing separating them from their conflicts or personal vendettas with each other.

The heart and soul of this film is found in the previously mentioned Cowboy, who has seemingly stumbled straight out of a Sam Peckinpah western. Even going so far as to reference the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, Cowboy envisions himself as a man fighting against the tide of change, but he’s not going to go down without a fight. It’s here that the film finds its footing as a sort of Neo-western, echoing the likes of The Wild Bunch and Pat Garret & Billy the Kid, but with a modern deconstructionist edge. The sense of modern alienation one might find in the likes of William Holden’s Pike Bishop is replaced with a Don Quixote-esque sense of delusional grandeur, as Cowboy’s larger than life persona is slowly torn away from him. By the end of the film, he’s revealed to be just as aimless as the rest of the gang, but perhaps even more so as the lawless frontier he sees as his home has already been tamed.

Shot in minimally lit black and white, the film reminded me a lot of Clerks. Much as Kevin Smith’s experiences in retail hell are clearly evoked in that film, Pennell and Henkel’s film could only be made by someone who has spent many wasted nights behind a bar counter. The shameless attempts at flirting, inane drunken arguments, and palpable sense of loneliness that’s just outside the bar doors are all so real and lived in that one would swear Pennell just snuck a camera into a bar one night and all of this just happened to go down. It’s French New Wave Cinéma vérité by way of 70s hicksploitation. Or to put it another way, it’s The Last Picture Show as made by Whit Stillman.  

“The B&B is a Yankee joint, for Yankees. Ride the goddamn mechanical bull…It aint’ the same. That ain’t Texas. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be… goddamn 7-11’s, McDonalds’, condominiums, suburbs. Pretty soon, all that good shit is gonna be gone!” - Cowboy

That pithy quote summarizes so much of what Last Night at the Alamo encapsules. It’s a tight, energetic yarn that’s got a drunken gaze on the rearview, staring longly at something will soon fade away into the horizon. In the immortal words of Semisonic: “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”